The Armory Show, March 7 – 10, 2019: Pier 94, Booth P7

In our second year at The Armory Show, we are proud to present Rodrigo Valenzuela's series American-type, recently exhibited at Light Work and concurrently on view at the Orange County Museum of Art. Using a labor-intensive process that the artist calls a "performance for the camera", Valenzuela questions American culture's attraction to simplified representation.

For our second year at Material, Upfor presents new work by gallery artists Ronny Quevedo and Rodrigo Valenzuela, as well as a recent collaboration between Quevedo and Harold Mendez. All three are friends and peers from their CORE Fellowships in Houston, and they share interests in the politics of immigration, undefined spaces that are charged with political history, and an affinity for multidisciplinary methods of making that employ, and question, traditions of objective representation.

Morehshin Allahyari’s She Who Sees The Unknown recontextualizes goddesses and female Jinn of Persian and Arabic origin. Using scanning, 3D printing, video and archiving as tools of investigation, the artist explores ancient myths as they relate to digital colonialism, oppression and catastrophe.

During the recent Material Art Fair in Mexico City, gallery artist Rodrigo Valenzuela spoke with Hyperallergic's Anna Furman about work from the series New Land and Sense of Place.

Using a multi-step photocopying process, Valenzuela projects abstract lines onto unpeopled desert scenes — hinting at houses, governmental offices, and memorial structures yet to be built. Valenzuela’s labor-intensive practices reference the paperwork-heavy process of applying for citizenship in the US, with which he’s directly familiar. He’s now a professor with permanent residency, but when he first moved to the US in his 20’s, he was an undocumented construction worker. He spoke to Hyperallergic about growing up in Chile during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, reckoning with the troubling histories of beautiful landscapes, and reconciling the idealized American Dream with the realities of life as an undocumented person.

Join us at Fort Mason in San Francisco, February 23rd through 25th, for Photofairs as we present photo-based works by Oregon artist Ben Buswell. These new works further his exploration of tensions between image and object: Buswell experiments with ways to abstract, interrupt or erode photographic imagery to emphasize the physical characteristics of media, such as the emulsion layer's gloss. His imagery is typically grounded in geologic features laced with histories of ethical and political tensions.